British Airways staff offer to work for less

Unions representing British Airways cabin crew have handed shareholders a compromise deal with staff offering take a 2.6% pay cut.

Offer: BA staff have offered to take a pay cut.

Unite said the deal, which would also freeze salaries at the lower level until February 2011, will provide 'substantial' savings for British Airways, running to hundreds of millions of pounds.

The offer falls short of the deal proposed by BA chief executive Willie Walsh and it remains to be seen whether BA management will accept the deal.

The Unite deal will be detailed in letters handed out to BA shareholders at the airline's annual meeting in London next week.

Unite said: 'We cannot understand why the company would dismiss such significant savings and productivity measures as a mutually-acceptable, non-conflict way forward.

'Our fear is it can only be because BA's management are opportunistically using the recession to force through changes which are more far-reaching and damaging to BA's future.'

Unite said warnings by BA's chief executive, Willie Walsh, that the company was fighting for its survival were 'misguided' because they 'talked down' the airline.

Shareholders will be told that the company wanted to introduce poorer contracted employment, cut 4,000 jobs, freeze pay for two years, introduce limitless, indefinable 'total flexibility' and end lifetime career opportunities at the airline in favour of low-paid, short-term employees working for no more than five years.

'This is not our vision for BA. This is a nightmare, one which will see BA reduced to scrapping at the lower end of the labour market.

'Instead of being an employer proud of how it treats its employees, it will become one with only the bare legal minimum of protections in place.

'The reputation damage of these changes will be profound and irreversible.'